If, instead of saying, Base no system on a human being, he had said, Never experimentalize with one, he would have been nearer the truth of his own case.  He had experimented on humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once, when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity’s failings fell on the shoulders of his son.  Richard’s parting laugh in the train—­it was explicable now:  it sounded in his ears like the mockery of this base nature of ours at every endeavour to exalt and chasten it.  The young man had plotted this.  From step to step Sir Austin traced the plot.  The curious mask he had worn since his illness; the selection of his incapable uncle Hippias for a companion in preference to Adrian; it was an evident, well-perfected plot.  That hideous laugh would not be silenced:  Base, like the rest, treacherous, a creature of passions using his abilities solely to gratify them—­never surely had humanity such chances as in him!  A Manichaean tendency, from which the sententious eulogist of nature had been struggling for years (and which was partly at the bottom of the System), now began to cloud and usurp dominion of his mind.  As he sat alone in the forlorn dead-hush of his library, he saw the devil.

How are we to know when we are at the head and fountain of the fates of them we love?

There by the springs of Richard’s future, his father sat:  and the devil said to him:  “Only be quiet:  do nothing:  resolutely do nothing:  your object now is to keep a brave face to the world, so that all may know you superior to this human nature that has deceived you.  For it is the shameless deception, not the marriage, that has wounded you.”

“Ay!” answered the baronet, “the shameless deception, not the marriage:  wicked and ruinous as it must be; a destroyer of my tenderest hopes! my dearest schemes!  Not the marriage—­the shameless deception!” and he crumpled up his son’s letter to him, and tossed it into the fire.

How are we to distinguish the dark chief of the Manichaeans when he talks our own thoughts to us?

Further he whispered, “And your System:—­if you would be brave to the world, have courage to cast the dream of it out of you:  relinquish an impossible project; see it as it is—­dead:  too good for men!”

“Ay!” muttered the baronet:  “all who would save them perish on the Cross!”

And so he sat nursing the devil.

By and by he took his lamp, and put on the old cloak and cap, and went to gaze at Ripton.  That exhausted debauchee and youth without a destiny slept a dead sleep.  A handkerchief was bound about his forehead, and his helpless sunken chin and snoring nose projected up the pillow, made him look absurdly piteous.  The baronet remembered how often he had compared his boy with this one:  his own bright boy!  And where was the difference between them?

“Mere outward gilding!” said his familiar.

“Yes,” he responded, “I daresay this one never positively plotted to deceive his father:  he followed his appetites unchecked, and is internally the sounder of the two.”